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The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.

Lou Gerstner

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Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
Real
Governance
Involvement
Mechanism
Owners
Corporate
Active

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

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I don't want to use the word reorganization. Reorganization to me is shuffling boxes, moving boxes around. Transformation means that you're really fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It's a lot more than just playing with boxes.
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My parents worked enormously hard to put four children through college. We didn't have a lot of money.
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Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
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IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
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People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
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I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.
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Every now and then, a technology comes along that is so profound, so powerful, so universal, that its impact will change everything. It will transform every institution in the world. It will create winners and losers, will change the way we do business, the way we teach our children, communicate and interact as individuals.
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If the practices and processes inside a company don't drive the execution of values, then people don't get it. The question is, do you create a culture of behavior and action that really demonstrates those values and a reward system for those who adhere to them?
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You can never be comfortable with your success, you've got to be paranoid you're going to lose it.
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Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.
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For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
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If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars. My salary was the same for 10 years. It was all performance-based.
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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
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Never confuse activity with results.
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Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land.
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The fundamental issue is: In the world of the Internet, is there a place for a packager of services? Does the customer want to go surf the Net and go to every one of 50,000 Web sites? Or will people pay a reasonable amount for somebody to go out and preselect and package what they want? My guess is they will both coexist.
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In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
Lou Gerstner
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I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
Lou Gerstner
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The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
Lou Gerstner